Huh. So here I come to whine about JUST getting my book, and now you're doing a Challenge on it already. BUT it's not even mentioned anywhere here yet??
Allright then... Just last month, a 4th ed. of the fabulous e-Learning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Colvin Clark & RICHARD MAYER , was released. Among update and new chapters, it includes evidence-based information on the Principles (4. Multimedia; 5. Contiguity; 6. Modality; 7. Redundancy; 8. Coherence; 9. Personalization & Embodiment; 10. Segmenting & Pretraining.) :
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1119158664/ To be honest, I haven't read the 4th ed. yet, and the last time I DID read it was the 2nd ed. But between this and William Horton's e-Learning By Design, they were my co-bibles when I was getting into eLearning (or e-learning or E-Learning) .
As a matter of fact you can find the 3rd edition via :
http://formulasi.googlecode.com/files/e-Learning.pdf to see if it may be worth your while to check out.
HTH!
Alison